BEAUTY IN THE MEDIA

The aim of this blog is to focus on aspects of portraying beauty in the media; the negative and positive-if any. This topic is very important because the media actually manipulate us when telling us what is beautiful, how to perceive beauty and by continual portraying only the one type of a perfect woman make us consider it standard. Those women are all young, beautiful and thin. It looks like we are living in a perfect world full of perfect looking people. But how often do we actually meet those people in a real life? How often do we meet them on a street?

In fact, nobody can see what is actually behind it, behind this “media perfection.” Nobody realizes that many of those women may suffer from eating disorders and that the number of women who can really look like that is actually very small. Despite of all this, it does not stop women from trying to look the same and later ending with eating disorders or low self-esteem.

neděle 16. května 2010

12 year old girl suffering anorexia

In 2007 there has been created a video by an American student from the McGill University. It is about a 12 year old girl called Natasha who was admitted to the clinic for anorexia. Natasha is the youngest patient there and talks about her feelings. Her classmates were telling her she was skinny already but she would not listen to them and wanted to see that herself.

In my opinion this is just another example of the negative impact of portrayals of perfect and super slim women. This only leads to the eating disorders at girls of very early age; they are simply told by the media that those women look great. They are growing up with those “standards of beauty” and the media do not tell them what is behind this look. Moreover, there is a number of popular actresses and top models very often caught up on pictures looking too skinny (as Keira Knightly, Tori Spelling, etc.) and they are still portrayed as standards of beauty. It is no wonder that girls like Natasha can not later recognize what is normal and healthy and what it is not. According to that video, “the fear of becoming fat is so overwhelming that young girls indicated that they are more afraid of becoming fat than they are of cancer, nuclear war or even losing their parents. Media shows that only skinny people are beautiful such as favorite actresses or models. What children do not know is how the media modifies the reality of what is skinny. Dieting, excessive exercise and Photoshop are affluent in the media business.”[1]

I think this all is just sad and people should learn to have other priorities in life than just getting thin so they look like someone who is not even “real.”


Media, how we perceive ourselves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-LpRxxPw5c&feature=related

[1] Media, how we perceive ourselves;<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-LpRxxPw5c&feature=related>; May 14, 2010

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